This is a continuation-in-part of application Ser. No. 07/010,989, filed Feb. 5, 1987.
The present invention relates to the translation of documents having a source text written in any one of a plurality of national languages being translated into a text that is written in any one of a plurality of second target national languages by utilizing a created international language as an intermediate pathway between the two chosen national languages.
The desire of various nationalities speaking different languages to readily converse has been ever present in the history of humanity. There are about 3,000 known languages in the world (the number varies according to what is counted as a language; dialects that are clearly just that are not included in this number), and each is the vehicle of a culture that is different in at least some ways from any other culture. The learning and teaching of languages, the recording of languages in intercultural communication are matters of primary importance.
Languages have had to be taught and learned for centuries. Everywhere, when speakers of different languages have come in contact, somebody had to learn a foreign language. There have always been individuals who found it interesting or profitable to do this. The earliest of explorers and traders were forced by necessity to learn to understand one another's language or to perish in the economic as well as the physical worlds. This, as we all know, resulted in extensive and long language studies with the erudite academicians handling the complex aspects of the communications exchange, while the more pragmatic day-to-day traders and businessmen developed short terse means of communication. A need arose to satisfy the requirements of an exact but easy means for correspondence between lay persons and small businessmen.
Small, handheld, phrase books proliferated to facilitate phonetic intercourse by visiting tourists and servicemen. Unfortunately, the phonics in these booklets, as well as their limited scope, limited the amount of intercourse possible. Small dictionaries that permitted word to word translation were available but unfortunately they did not provide a means for transposing words to give a more accurate grammatical rendition in the target language. Variations on these items became available upon the appearance of the liquid and gaseous crystal readout devices which permitted storage of a limited vocabulary of words and their direct translatable equivalents in a phonic form. Here again, the limited capacity did not permit the introduction of adequate grammatical improvement of syntax.
The advent of the personal computers and the microprocessors has brought a flood of approaches to the patent offices around the world. The devices have ranged from direct word for word translation devices to key word translation directly into phrases. For example, a word to word translation device can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 4,502,128, TRANSLATION BETWEEN NATURAL LANGUAGES, this patent being directed to an inputting of a sentence described by a first natural language being sectioned into individual words. Parts of speech corresponding to these individual words are retrieved from a lexical word storage, whereby the input sentence is described by a corresponding string of the parts-of-speech as retrieved. A translation pattern table previously prepared compares strings of parts-of-speech for the first natural language with those of the second language and transforms the first strings of parts-of-speech into strings of parts-of-speech of the second language. The output sentence described by the second natural language is generated by sequencing target words in accordance with the sequential order of the parts of speech of the string pattern obtained after the transformation. This is a complex procedure at best.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,412,305; 4,541,069 4,439,836 and 4,365,315 relate to translation devices wherein a single word is used as the input to produce the translation of entire groups of words, such as sentences or phrases; a single word entered will access particular sentences within limited subject categories; letters within words or groups of words produces an equivalency detectable by a comparison circuit resulting in the representation in a second language of a plurality of words regardless of whether it is a noninflected word or an inflected word; and phrases can be tied to computer specified aural or visual control messages for use by an operator who chooses to use a particular language in the operation of a machine tool. Similarly, alphabetical accessing to an electronic translator can be accomplished by storing address codes with each word, as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,541,069; as well as utilization of a system for automatically hyphenating and verifying the spelling of words in a multi-lingual document can be carried out under U.S. Pat. No. 4,456,969.
As can be seen from study of these prior art references, generally found in U.S.Cl. 364/900, a direct translation from one natural language to another natural language has a multiplicity of roadblocks, either in the lack of an available direct translation or in major grammatical problems due to language structure or in the relative stage of development of one of the languages.
Later patents relating to translation systems and apparatus can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,774,596; 4,774,666; 4,800,522; 4,814,987; 4,814,988; and 4,833,611. These patents relate, among other things, to the use of translation dictionaries, defined grammatical rules and tree conversion rules which, unfortunately, are quite rigid in nature in that the apparatus and systems involved merely utilize direct translation between languages and rigid grammatical relationships. They do not have the flexibility or adaptibility necessary to handle the translation of unique clauses or phrases.
None of the cited references have the universality and reversibility that is found in the present invention and its improvements set forth hereinafter. The cited references are useable only with a single source language going into a single target language. To adapt such reference devices and systems for use with other languages would require a complete reworking of the programs.